COVID-19 has changed many things about our school days, not the least of which has been snow days. It is not unusual for Nebraska to have bitterly cold and snowy winters, ensuring that the students of Nebraska get a couple snow days a year.

However, with the advent of online learning, many schools are choosing to do away with snow days. This has led many students to wonder if this is the end of those surprise days off. 

Mercy High School, which has given the student body two snow days so far this year, sent an email to its students last week saying, “The next snow day will be no classes, any snow days beyond that will be remote classes.”

With cold temperatures and snow expected, Mercy High School will probably see its last snow day of the year soon as well as have a couple remote learning days.

Mercy is not alone in its stance on snow days. Omaha Public Schools has already resorted to online days for their previous two snow days. With many other schools following Omaha Public’s example, could this be the end of snow days? And if so what would it look like without them?

At Mercy, while remote days would probably be similar to our hybrid days during COVID, there might be some minor changes. One possible change might be quizzes and tests. Since everyone would be back to school the next day teachers might choose to postpone tests and quizzes until later to cut down on the possibility of cheating.

Another change might be how many classes require students to Zoom in. During the hybrid schedule students were expected to stay on zoom the whole class for every period on Wednesdays.

However the rest of the week, students only had to Zoom in for a few minutes to some of their classes and the whole hour for others. For a remote day in place of a snow day, it is more likely that students would be required to Zoom in for the entire class period for all of their classes. 

What will Mercy’s remote days look like? Will there soon be no such thing as snow days? With so much snow and cold temperatures on the way it is likely we won’t have to wait long for the answers to these questions.